I was excited to try the November Living’s Cookie of the Month. This month, the cookie is a maple cookie. They looked gorgeous in the magazine.

Beautiful dough

Making the dough was quick and simple. It seemed a little weird that it only used one egg yolk, not a whole egg (although I guess this makes it more like a shortbread). After you make the dough, you have to refrigerate it for two hours. This told me it was going to be sticky dough. Fear not! This is something I have experience with. My grandmother’s recipe for sugar cookies is practically goo until you freeze it and roll it out quickly. There are family legends of my aunt going out to roll them out in the garage in the middle of winter because it is so sticky.

After refrigerating, I rolled it out. It was pretty firm and not very sticky at all. Really not a big deal.

Rolling and cutting out

The recipe says to roll it out on lightly floured parchment paper. Ha! Are they joking?? I tried this and the paper kept slipping. I tried weighting it down with cans at the corners. I tried sticking some dough underneath it. Nothing worked – in retrospect it must have looked pretty funny – the parchment slipping all over and me attacking it with a rolling pin with flour flying everywhere. It really annoyed me! Finally I just floured my counter and rolled it out there. Take that!

Ready for the oven

The recipe also says to roll it out then stick it in the freezer before cutting out the cookies. Forget that – I was going to get this done! I went ahead and cut them out immediately. A little help from a spatula and they were on the tray. The thicker you make the dough, the easier it is to cut them out. I like my cookies a little thicker than what the recipe called for.

Speaking of cookie trays – Martha wanted me to put parchment paper on the trays. I use Aire-Bake trays with a latex non-stick sheet thingy on them. No need for parchment paper AND it’s more environmentally friendly. Take that, Martha!

These took forever to cook. Finally I gave up and cranked on convection and

Cookie seepage!

that did the trick. They did spread more than I expected so I had to do a little creative cutting! After they cool (Martha says to use baking racks – which I do not own, so I just let them cool on the trays), you spread maple syrup on them and then sprinkle on sanding sugar. I don’t have sanding sugar but I had a jar of pure cane sugar that was very coarse that we brought home from Hawaii, so I used that.

Voila! Very pretty

The end result looked very fall-like. However, the taste was not so great. Another disappointment! The cookies were not very sweet. They did have a maple flavor, but they were just bland and boring. The kids, who swooped in as I was removing them from the oven, thought they were ok (but really, cookies have to pretty bad for my children to reject them). No one was wild about them. I’m packing the rest up and sending them to Mr. MarthaandMe’s office. In my opinion, there are so many good cookie recipes out there that I don’t want to waste the calories on ones that are not so good. They weren’t awful, but they just didn’t excite me in any way.

What’s the deal Martha? Two bum desserts in this issue – both the dessert of the month and the cookie of the month. Not a very good thing. Does Martha even taste these recipes herself I wonder? What do you think?